Here we are at the start of summer in Montreal, a time for planning holidays, making the most of precious warm-weather months and maybe enjoying a few World Cup games on outdoor terrasses. So what was the main topic of conversation in many bars, cafés and open-line radio shows on Friday? Who Habs GM Marc Bergevin was going to pick up at the draft this weekend in Dallas and whether or not captain Max Pacioretty was going to be traded.

The Habs are a 365-day, 24/7 thing in Quebec and I think that’s fine and dandy. I love the idea that post-barbecue at the cottage in late July, you wander back into the house, switch on the TV and spend an hour watching a bunch of guys on L’Antichambre yelling and shouting about who should be playing on the third line of the Canadiens come October.

People often wonder why Quebecers have such a passion for the only National Hockey League team in the province and for me it is clear it’s because the team has a social/political/cultural importance that goes far beyond anything to do with pushing a little piece of rubber around the ice. The bottom line is that the Canadiens are inextricably linked with Quebec’s language politics.

Remember that the team was founded in 1909 by an English-Canadian businessman Ambrose O’Brien specifically to provide a hockey club for French-Canadian fans. Prior to that, professional hockey in Montreal had been dominated by teams tied to the English, Irish and Scottish communities, notably the Winged Wheelers of the Montreal Amateur Athletic Association, the Shamrocks, and the Victorias.

From the beginning there was a political/social mission to the Canadiens. In fact, the best comparison is with Glasgow Celtic, a soccer team created in 1887 to raise money for the poor Irish immigrant population in East End Glasgow.

Until the 1980s, many of the most celebrated Canadiens players were franco Canadians, legendary local heroes like Maurice Richard, Jean Béliveau, Serge Savard, Guy Lafleur and Patrick Roy. The ironic wrinkle is that language politics are still a big part of the Canadiens culture, but they have way fewer francophone players. At one point recently the only franco on the team was David Desharnais and when he was out of the lineup one night, firebrand Le Journal de Montréal columnist Réjean Tremblay penned an angry column denouncing the team for being anti-French.

And those politics are still a factor today. Do you really think the Canadiens trading for Jonathan Drouin last year had nothing to do with language?

I posted on Twitter Thursday about the New York Islanders hiring Barry Trotz as head coach and I mentioned that a friend had sent me an email about the hiring, with the following comment: ‘This is what happens when you have a competent head of hockey operations.” Ouch! So true. But then my colleague Stu Cowan replied to tweet: ‘Also when you don’t have to hire a bilingual coach.’ Then my timeline just exploded with dozens of tweets in a passionate argument about whether it’s a handicap or not that it has become the accepted wisdom that Montreal has to have a bilingual coach.

A regular What the Puck reader sent me the news about Barry Trotz being hired as coach of the Islanders with the following comment attached: This is what happens when you have a competent head of hockey operations. https://t.co/XyZ7dHUWHZ

I think that requirement is a handicap and it’s sad to see that the team has re-hired two consecutive coaches that they previously fired. The funny thing is that the team’s owner and president Geoff Molson, a member of maybe English-Montreal’s most famous family, is arguably the person most convinced that the coach has to be able to speak French.

Molson himself is fluently bilingual and very sensitive to the feelings of his francophone fans. I sometimes wonder if the reason he has hung on to Bergevin way beyond his past-due date is partly because Molson is an anglophone from Westmount and Bergevin is a francophone from St-Henri. You know that when Bergevin gets fired — which will happen — someone, probably Tremblay, will pen a furious column saying the Westmount boss has given the boot to the working-class franco guy.

Remember what happened when previous GM Pierre Gauthier fired Jacques Martin as coach and replaced him with Randy Cunneyworth? The province exploded in a white rage. You’d have thought the British came back and conquered New France a second time. And who was the owner at that time? Yup a chap named Geoff Molson, who released the following statement after a few days of raging editorials.

“Although our main priority remains to win hockey games and to keep improving as a team. It is obvious that the ability for the head coach to express himself in both French and English will be a very important factor in the selection of the permanent head coach.”

That’s why Claude Julien is behind the bench today. He was the best bilingual coach available, not the best coach available. For the best description of the intersection of Quebec politics and the Habs, read or re-read Ken Dryden’s The Game. His description of playing a game at the Forum on Nov. 15, 1976, the night the Parti Québécois first swept into power, nails that unique relationship between this team and our political battles.

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